Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161 and Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever writ...więcej »
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, an ordinary man struggling against the overwhelming power of a totalitarian state. Although he enjoys brief moments of love and freedom, Smith...więcej »
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their h...więcej »
His stories are fillled with the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corrupt...więcej »
The doppelgänger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most brilliant realization in Robert Louis Steven...więcej »
That Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Prince – the world’s pre-eminent how-to manual o...więcej »
There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the...więcej »
An immaculate success on its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels has since had an odd double life as both a classic traveller’s tale for children and a scathing satire of the human ...więcej »
Emma Woodhouse ‘had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her’, but during the course of this, the wisest and most disturbing of Jane Austen&rsq...więcej »
The Edwardian era was the Golden Age of childhood, of high adventure and fantasy, and home for tea in the nursery. Or not... The story of the boy who took the quest for untrammelled freedom to its ...więcej »
Set in British India in the 1920s, this book looks at racial conflict. The characters struggle to overcome their own differences and prejudices, but when the Indian Dr Aziz is tried for the alleged...więcej »
During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the presen...więcej »
In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolu...więcej »
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in ...więcej »
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed . If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repr...więcej »
In the book which put South America on the literary map, Marquez tells the haunting story of a community lost in the depths of that almighty continent where time passes slowly. A poetic masterpiece...więcej »
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrato...więcej »
An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determinatio...więcej »
A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. The 'catch' is that soldie...więcej »
This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is...więcej »
